Business manners

Anything but love, actually

What should bosses give their staff for Christmas?

BEFORE those office Christmas parties begin in earnest, glance at the Harvard Business Review. In its December issue it has an interview with “Miss Manners”, Judith Martin, whose syndicated column advises millions of Americans on vital matters of etiquette—such as whether to wear diamonds before dark or to write college applications in pink ink. In the HBR, Miss Manners argues that the American workplace is now too informal for its own good. Workers are dangerously confusing colleagues and friends. “Office collections for the umpteenth bridal or baby shower have destroyed the sense of boundaries that characterises professional behaviour.”

America's informal business practices have spread so widely that such sentiments can strike a chord anywhere these days. Where they do, employees need to be particularly wary of Christmas. It is a dangerous time for firms that go along with the fashionable belief that workers are most productive if freed from the constraints that etiquette imposes. Not only could the traditional grope in a dark corner at the office “do” end up in dismissal and a criminal record these days, but the intra-office gift-giving rituals can also lead to trouble.

In the current British hit movie, “Love Actually”, the story (in so far as there is one) revolves around the build-up to Christmas. One character, the brother-in-law of a British prime minister, is the boss of a London-based business which convincingly proves that the relationship between a firm's productivity and the personal proximity of its employees is an inverse one. All his staff are so busy inter-relating that they have little time for anything else. When the boss buys his flirtatious assistant a necklace for Christmas and his wife a Joni Mitchell CD, it is almost the end of his marriage.